Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Knowledge is not enough

I just finished a book called Proving You’re Qualified and a
book called Training Yourself: the 21st Century Credential, both by
Charles D. Hayes, and found a huge gap in his premise.

I looked into a website called Zero Tuition College and another
called UnCollege and found that both suffer from the same missing element as Mister
Hayes’ books.

A credential is important not for the knowledge it
supposedly represents, but for the person you are talking to. Only a small
percentage of the work force will end up starting their own business and
following in the footsteps of Bill Gates to succeed without a degree.

While everyone may aspire to start their own business or
work for that super startup, big companies have lots of employees so that is
where the bulk of the jobs are. HR departments in big companies are swamped
with applicants and are scared to death of making a mistake and recommending a
“bad” candidate.

That being true, the poor HR clerk reviewing applicants is looking
for a quick and safe way to wade through that mountain of resumes. The first
thing they can do that is fast and safe is to screen for an accredited degree.
What can be safer than saying to your boss, “She must know how to do the work,
she has a degree in that very thing from XYZ College.”

If you pursue self-education as recommended in both books,
how do you prove to perspective employers that you really can do the work?
While a portfolio (even as an online website) works well for designers, photographers
or artists this non-traditional approach really doesn’t work very well for
engineers or mangers.

While Mr. Hayes is absolutely correct in his ascertain that
everyone will have to invest significant time and energy in continuing their
professional education, even that must come with some kind of recognized
credential. Why? Because when it comes time to assign work or look for the
worker ready for promotion, your boss is going to look for that same safe and
easy differentiator as he or she does when hiring a new candidate.

A qualification that they can point to so that when their
boss asks why they picked that that person, they have some recognized “thing”
to point to; something beyond the selector’s opinion that this is the right
applicant.

While there is much to support the position that far too
many people graduating from college today have memorized facts that they forget
as soon as the test is over, no one has yet come up with a better way to prove
that people have at least “read the book” than a degree.

Yes, a person’s demonstrated experience could be used. But
remember that the screener is looking for a fast, safe way to select
candidates. Reading resumes is not fast; you can’t really read a resume in the
time it takes to scan for a degree. It’s not safe; the screener has to make a
judgment call as to which experience is relevant and how complete the
experience seems to be.

Before the current system can be replaced, someone is
going to have to come up with a new credentialing system to replace or tap into
the current system that will validate experience gained outside the current formal
classrooms.